Monday, November 10, 2008

Why is it that there always seems to be technical difficulties?? Not just in work, but in life. The DVR doesn’t record what it’s supposed to record. The batteries die and your alarm clock fails to wake you. Things break down, systems fail, and in life you have technical difficulties.

I got the chance to cover the City of Athens website launch this weekend. You expect something like a website launch to have issues, especially a brand new one. There were obviously small issues like a slow internet connection and pages not loading, but overall, it went off without a hitch. Lucky city, if only the same could have been said for me.

With all of our training and field experience, there are always things that are going to go wrong. We got to the meeting early, set up our camera, laid the microphone on the desk, and turned everything on.

Test, test… one, two….. nothing.

Our microphone appeared to not be working. Try as we might to get it to work, nothing. So we resorted to plan B. We got our sound, but not as clear and powerful as we had hoped. And then, out of nowhere, help arrived!

One of the WOUB Newswatch reporters showed up to cover the same story with a camera and microphone that worked together. We may have had technical difficulties, but we made it work. We shot our interviews together, shared a tape and got over our technical difficulties. I’m not sure what I would have done without my helper, but thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about it.

Life throws technical difficulties at you all the time. There’s not much we can do about it, unless you know someone who knows a thing or two about how to fix your problem, or some unexpected help shows up when you least suspect it. Isn’t technology great?